


A Coin in Your Mint

by theoldgods



Category: Rocketman (2019)
Genre: Alcohol, Blow Jobs, Developing Relationship, Drug Use, Intoxicated Sex, M/M, implied infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-29 01:30:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19819750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theoldgods/pseuds/theoldgods
Summary: Elton and his very much lover/almost full-time manager at the end of a brief tour through America, where sex is easily had, chemical happiness is plentiful, and John is learning, quite efficiently, how to handle Elton's moods with the least disruption possible to their careers.





	A Coin in Your Mint

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place roughly during the period of time captured by "Honky Cat" in the film, just before Dick and Ray are booted. Elton and John are at the end of the honeymoon period of their relationship, and while there's no direct physical abuse here yet, the dynamics that will lead there are definitely apparent to a (sober) discerning eye.
> 
> This is based on film depictions only and as such should not be taken as comment on the real-life Elton/John or Elton&Bernie relationships in any way. See endnotes for more spoiler-y content warnings, if needed.
> 
> Title, of course, is from "Take Me to the Pilot."

“I really can’t be arsed.”

The edge of the bed digs into Elton’s bare skin as he takes a swig from the open bottle next to him. Feet away, John, an unslicked lock of hair curling across his forehead, meets Elton’s eyes in the mirror as he reaches for one cuff. More than a year after John’s triumphant return to the studio closet, Elton still feels the bottom of his stomach drop out at that smug sidelong glance, the nearly psychedelic blueness piercing, so bracingly, into Elton’s face, just as it had one humid LA evening.

“And whyever not?” John asks their mirror selves, lips wide and happy, as he releases his still unbuttoned sleeve. Jitteriness burbles down Elton’s throat—brandy, and those peculiar nerves he has for everything not onstage that the brandy is meant to cure, and maybe a lingering hit of the line John had tapped out onto the hotel’s glass beer mat for him an hour ago. “You like to be looked at, and I’m beginning to think no one looks at you with more love in their eyes than—what do they say around here?—America’s heartland.”

“Chicago is not the heartland; Bernie doesn’t like it enough for that.” Bernie had, in fact, chosen to remain in LA after their most recent stand there rather than follow Elton around the middle of the country, a fact Elton is keenly aware of whenever his mind stops fixating on setlists or John. Elton takes another long sip as John turns from the mirror. “You shouldn’t even be here,” he continues, pushing his voice toward a whine as John, one eyebrow raised, slides the bottle from his grip, drawing the pressure of his knuckles across the back of Elton’s hand. “It’s not official yet.”

“Ray isn’t sitting back in London thinking all’s tickety-boo, darling,” John whispers, voice deliciously hoarse, touching his lips to Elton’s ear as Elton smiles at the ceiling. “He knows. He’ll be over it before we can even tell him next week. It’s all but done.”

There are witty replies to be made, and yet when John presses his hand just so, pulling Elton’s face into the warmth of his beautifully uncalloused fingers—so unlike the bloody ruins of Elton’s after weeks on the road—and brushing the coolness of his watch and pinky ring against Elton's chin, Elton has to fight to keep his mind focused on anything that isn’t his cache of sense memories of John Reid. Even the jangling note that’s the imminent removal of Dick and Ray must fight to be felt above the room’s soft, sweet spin.

“I’d rather stay here with you.”

“Aye.” John’s tongue is warmer than his breath, tingly with the Hebridean whisky he’s insisted Elton’s rooms be supplied with in every bloody two-cow university town they’ve barreled through in the past weeks. “Shagging me doesn’t pay the bills, unfortunately.”

“Strictly speaking,” Elton murmurs, finding control of his limbs at last and bracketing John’s waist between his bare legs, until his cock makes contact with surprisingly soft trouser fabric, “I’m the one up for sale to the highest bidder.” He closes his eyes and shivers as John’s thumb comes to rest on his lip. “And I can’t bear another evening of you, me, and the world’s least cultured and worst-accented American tour promoters, drinking bad American martinis. I told you yesterday: I want to be with the lads.”

John pulls softly at the edge of Elton’s left eye, wiping away some invisible tear Elton doesn’t even feel like shedding, before leaning away, taking Elton’s center of gravity along with the warmth of his breath and body. Elton blinks and sits up as John cocks his head.

" _The lads_ don’t really pay the bills either, love.” He glances down at Elton’s stomach and thighs with calculating eyes so like those he turns from time to time on business associates. Elton fights a sudden feeling—a burst of cold water down his spine—to snap his legs shut and waits instead for the light tripping wooziness, balm of every road-weary musician, to return. “We must.”

“And if I just say ‘bugger it’ and spend the evening buggering myself instead?”

John’s smile is quick, fully suffusing his face, and _ah_ , there’s the joy again, bound up in John Reid’s lips and warm-again eyes and the brandy dancing through Elton’s veins, any hint of businessman lost as he eyes America’s nearly favorite pop star, fully nude against a hotel bed.

“You and what cock, sir?”

Elton wants to whimper like the fat schoolboy he sometimes still forgets he isn’t any longer, wants to collapse in John’s arms and ask for a long recitation of the filthiest words in the English language. (He’s done it before, four times by his count, and John has relented exactly once, sprawled on his back in their bed in the gorgeously kitschy flat they’re sharing until the arrangements for Elton’s grandiose manor come through, chanting praises to Elton’s cock in a particularly put-upon burr while Elton, midthrust, collapsed in laughter against him.) He settles instead for palming John through the placket of his trousers and laughing when he feels how very soft everything still is.

“Quid pro quo, then,” John murmurs, possibly into Elton’s ear, possibly to himself or to the duvet, and then his hands are on Elton’s hips, pushing him further up the bed, and then Elton’s cock is encased in dry, soft flesh and the room spins in earnest, on the edge of discomfort, until John’s hand is replaced by wet warmth and John, looming _above_ Elton somehow, even from between his legs, takes Elton down his throat from tip to stem.

It’s pure flash, a party trick—Elton knows that now, though he’d been entirely overwhelmed when John had first used this on him, that morning in that first hotel when John, even with his body weight forcing Elton into the mattress and the warm almost-softness of his chest hair against Elton’s, was still as much a dream as the rest of their fevered Troubadour week—and it works, of course, Elton turning his head to moan into the bed as John pulls off until he’s merely kissing the head, the tiniest touch of tongue tickling down the shaft as Elton feels what little blood remains in his head drain to where John’s mouth commands it.

Elton has mocked John’s skill at blowjobs before, made all manner of casting couch jokes even with his cock down John’s throat (and in the same midcoital breath begged him for lessons, which John proved surprisingly lackadaisical about giving, instead urging Elton to find his own eager way around John’s length and width, with varied results). John has an uncanny ability to spin them out for far longer than Elton had dreamed men ever did with one another, often leaving a debilitating tenderness in Elton’s lower abdomen for an hour or more afterward. Tonight, he moves swiftly from delicious gentle mouthing to intense pressure just along the underside ridge, exactly where he knows Elton will lose composure, and Elton’s heart stutters in a not entirely pleasant way as he realizes this will be over in record time.

He chooses to focus instead on John, John’s dark hair coming deliciously unglued between his distressingly pale thighs, John’s gaze darting up over the slight swell of Elton’s stomach to lock on Elton’s. When he comes, scant minutes later, his vision blurred even behind his increasingly foggy glasses, the release is a quick shot of adrenaline, followed by a hollow echo draining from his softening cock as John pulls off and turns toward the closet.

“Come,” he says, without looking back at Elton, boneless and itchily empty on the bed, and his voice is strangely distant, even accounting for booze and Elton’s dying high. “Let’s get dressed properly this time.”

* * *

Elton refuses to wear simple black anywhere, even for John’s respectable business sorts, and the suit John has acquiesced to, in their shared postorgasm malaise, is powder blue and studded with sequins along the sleeves, the shirt underneath filled with enough ruffles at neck and cuff to make Elton feel, magnificent as he is on three-inch heels, almost like he’s back onstage. In such a get-up he can relax into himself, forget whatever it is John needs from these specific promoters and just _play Elton_ , the role he was absolutely meant to become, even if he’s had to bribe destiny thus far to ensure it happens. After a weak martini and an hour of holding forth as Entertainment, capital E, he gets a splendid idea and retreats to the restroom, where he has the snuffbox John bought him for Christmas out and a line tapped along the counter before he can count to ten.

It’s been weeks since he had any of South America's finest; he refuses to touch it while playing, unwilling to be so sharp and overbright when the stage lights and the crowd already give him everything he could possibly need. But this is a performance of its own, without cheers and smiling faces, and it takes only a tiny bump to make everything so very vivid, perfect. He returns to John aglow from within, and he feels positively beatific when, five minutes later, John slides his hand into Elton’s pocket under cover of the table and takes the snuffbox back to the loo for his own edification.

John on coke is, in Elton’s estimation, John at his viciously funniest, John at his handsiest, John barely pulled back from the edge of pure panto-hall camp. Casting couch John, if needed, and Elton bites his tongue twice to stop himself from making exactly that observation in polite—that is to say, sexually _normal_ , as he and John laugh about behind closed doors—company. He has never seen John use at a business meeting before, though perhaps John senses the rhythms of the evening better than Elton does, because John hasn’t returned for more than ten minutes before the whole affair is breaking up, handshakes and suave witticisms, and they’re in the back of a car.

Elton fights the urge to lean his head on John’s shoulder as streets pass in chaotic headlights and honking cars, letting his mouth run on instead on how much he misses good old British cities, where there’s a chance of seeing the sky overhead instead of the horrifically looming steel behemoths Americans insist upon. When the car stops some time later and John pulls him out, Elton notices that they’re at a hotel that is not theirs, a realization that coincides with a dip in his high. He keeps a smile plastered on his face as he follows John through the lobby and into a lift, where John, minutes behind him and still very much up, backs Elton up against the mirrored wall and kisses him, messily, as they jerk into motion.

“Where are we?” Elton asks when John pulls off, wiping spit from the corners of their mouths with those soft fingers. He bites at John’s thumb, grinning as John lightly bats him away, taking up position well out of Elton’s reach.

“A reward for good behavior.”

The lift opens; Elton stumbles out after John into a dimly lit hall, nodding at the well-dressed staff gliding past. He says nothing, not even a happy coke ramble, as John knocks on the door to a penthouse suite, larger even than the one Elton has claimed in their own hotel, somewhere a thousand miles from here.

Elton knows the faces behind the door, most of their touring crew and a good twenty other fit people scrounged up from somewhere, though his brain is muddled enough that he only solidly puts a name to one.

Bernie is entangled with a very buxom blonde on a loveseat, but he gets up as soon as Elton appears, pulling him into a hug.

“Thank God.”

Elton has gone warm all over, fizzing like he would for John’s touch, and he splays his hand across Bernie’s back and lets his fingers smooth out wrinkles as he drinks in the California sunshine radiating from Bernie’s grin.

“Lazy bugger,” he whispers, so softly, lips against Bernie’s forehead. “Finally tore yourself away from the beach?”

“Fuck me for wanting better weather than the American Midwest, I guess,” Bernie says, the rare profanity setting Elton’s heart racing, Bernie's arms tightening across Elton’s torso before releasing him. “I did a Tower run before Reid called yesterday and told me I would be getting on a plane.”

Warmth floods Elton, at Bernie’s looting of record shops for him, at John’s oh so casual and strangely effective arranging of exactly what Elton always needs the most, almost before he realizes he needs it. Before he can reply, John himself has materialized at Elton’s elbow, wearing the supercharged smile that suggests he found a source of coke other than the box burning a hole in Elton’s trousers.

“Yes?” he asks, looking from Bernie back to Elton.

Elton wraps an arm around John in response, fingers skimming the top of his arse, and John’s eyes flash with delight and something surprisingly considering. He nods, decisively, and steps away from Elton, tightening his grip on the neck of a beer bottle.

“Bathroom is loaded with powder.”

John disappears into the crowd; Elton stares after him, frowning, his fingers itching to knead themselves fully into John’s arse, until Bernie drapes an arm over him and asks, his lips almost skimming Elton’s ear, “You want a line?”

Bernie is just happy on blow, a beaming tanned loon turning a silver tongue onto every woman he sees. Elton leads him around the suite for a bit, the John and Taupin double act, chattering at people who introduce themselves as promoters or marketers or executives and laugh at every word out of their mouths, no matter how senseless, though Bernie is eventually snared by the same blonde he’d been chatting up earlier in the evening and shunted off to a shadowy corner with alacrity. Elton, given a moment to breathe and dimly aware of a gaping hole of anxiety on the edge of his consciousness, is considering a return trip to the bathroom when a warm weight leans against his shoulder.

“You’re beautiful.”

John’s voice is soft but steady, barely a trace of coke or booze, even as the ever-present bottle in his hand knocks against Elton’s side. He’s close enough that his pelvis nearly brushes Elton’s hips, and his breath is humid, half a pant against Elton’s neck. Elton smiles and resists the urge to thread a hand through John’s hair where it flops against him.

“I know.”

It’s true, on a night like this, sparkling and benignly grandiose without the stage, his heart pulled not unpleasantly between John’s dark sleekness and the easy solidity of Bernie. John remains in position, touching him even amidst a crowd, and Elton wants to close his eyes and drink in the sense of rightness, the feeling that he needn’t pretend. (It’s an illusion, he knows; there is no group _that_ sympathetic.)

“Get another line,” John says as he lifts his head, shuffling an inch away, once again taking some small piece of Elton’s balance with him. “I’ll be in the back bedroom.”

Elton knows it’s a bad idea even as he bends over the counter, awaiting the rush. He knows John must be further off his head than he’s let on, to suggest something so brazen behind any doors other than their own. But the hit works exactly as it should, as he and John both know it will, and Elton, whistling, enters the bedroom to find John with his trousers pulled down to his knees, his cock hard and glistening between his thighs as he perches on the edge of an armchair.

“Christ.”

“I need your mouth,” John says, his voice taut but remarkably steady, one hand wrapped around the base of his cock while the other curls impotently against the chair. The top buttons of his shirt are undone; his gold medallion hangs out, dancing with the motions of his arm as he works himself. Elton stands gawping like the virgin John first met as John grimaces. “Please.”

“Here?”

John snorts, his hand moving faster.

“Isn’t going to get less dangerous the longer you stand there dithering.”

He always has the logic, no matter how absurd the situation; he always has the cool head Elton never missed in himself until he came into John’s orbit. Elton kneels before him, his own cock curiously flat in his trousers, and feels his mouth begin to water like one of those bloody psychological experiment dogs. ( _Pavlov_ , he reminds himself, stupidly, looking up into John’s blazing eyes.)

“You have the worst timing,” Elton says, because he _is_ high on cocaine and he can only rein in his mouth for so long. “We’re going to get caught, and I barely care even though I know I absolutely should but I thought you _definitely_ did, unless you’ve surrounded us with a bunch of safe and sympathetic poofs—”

“ _Don’t waste time_.”

John’s voice is very nearly a snarl, and Elton jumps back for a moment, rocking on the balls of his feet before he shrugs, places his glasses out of the way, and leans in to touch his lips to the swollen head of John’s cock.

John is pushy, transferring his hands to Elton’s neck and tilting himself into Elton’s mouth proper, and Elton feels his cock stir as he opens his mouth wider. John’s never been so desperate before—indeed, half the time John treats Elton’s mouth like some delicate mincing maiden, and this not-quite-roughness is something Elton finds himself welcoming even as an ache sets into his jaw.

It’s sweaty, the room hot and smelling of the sort of booze that wafts three days old out of an old sot’s pores, and John’s skin is overwarm and sour-tasting on Elton’s tongue, and Elton’s barely gotten his mouth around him, barely had time to begin to truly apply himself, and yet John is moaning, one arm flung across his mouth to muffle his cries, the other holding Elton’s face in position. Elton’s half blind, and all he can see is the hair on John’s thighs and the desperate deep reddish-purple of John’s cock each time he pulls off for a breath, and yet the light is so very bright around them both, and his mind is throwing itself around his skull with frenetic and not unpleasant energy, and his blood is thrumming, pounding against his temples and between his legs, and he’s full, that drifting emptiness of earlier this evening blessedly obliterated under the weight of coke and Bernie’s laugh and John’s cock.

 _It’s good_ , he decides, the thought floating into his head as if beamed there from another planet, and he nods to himself as he reaches up to cup one of John’s balls, still half trapped in his pants, and when John comes, without so much as a warning, some minute or so later, Elton finds himself distractedly smiling as his mouth and throat flood with salt. 

He waits to pull off until John, limp in the chair, begins to stir once more, and when he looks up, John’s face is blurred thanks to Elton’s myopia and the tracers dancing across his eyes. He could be any well-dressed businessman, and _Elton_ could be any cock-hungry young poof on a filthy bar bathroom floor, and it’s an idea that makes Elton feel both dreadfully and wonderfully anonymous, an image his mind dances around without daring to settle there. 

“Jesus,” John says eventually, his voice so thickly accented that it takes Elton a moment to parse. A sweaty hand cups the back of Elton’s neck, and he finds his muscles tensing, improbably, irrationally, until John begins massaging and everything coiled in Elton releases once more. John fumbles around with his other hand until he slides Elton’s glasses back into place, the metal blissfully cool against Elton’s skin, and his face slides into vivid clarity once more above Elton. “You _liked_ that?”

“ _You_ did?”

John blinks, then laughs, on the edge of harsh, and gets to his feet, redoing his trousers with quick, sure movements as Elton, clinging apparently quite alone to the afterglow, slides out of the way, his own knees too weak to hold him. 

“I’ll go first.”

John leaves the room before Elton can respond. When he finally gets to his feet, a few minutes later, and stumbles out into the hallway, Bernie is leaning against the wall with his hands kneading a redheaded woman’s arse. Elton shoots off a nonsense jibe he forgets before it finishes leaving his mouth; Bernie flips him the bird, and Elton laughs, sunlight darting across his mind again at last. He’s still chuckling when he reenters the sitting room and looks around to see John with his hand casually resting on the elbow of a beautiful man with neatly parted blond hair. John’s cheeks are red, his eyes crinkled, no businessman in sight as he leans in under cover of the party noise to put his head directly alongside the man’s.

Elton, dazed and suddenly _too_ full, goes in search of a spliff.

* * *

John thanks him when they enter their own suite, sometime just before dawn, Elton’s head throbbing and his throat dry. He stares at John for a moment, struggling to make sense of language as he collapses, fully dressed, onto the bed.

“For what?” he asks, too tired even to yawn, as John kicks off his shoes and crawls up behind him, wrapping an arm around Elton’s waist. His touch is very nearly claustrophobic against Elton’s exhausted, faintly high, and hungover body.

“For...your patience.” John kisses Elton’s hair, and it takes Elton, his muscles again improbably tensed, a moment to relax back into the gesture. “You did well.” John’s lips transfer to his own, long and sweet and slow as he hasn’t really done in—days, now?—and Elton, sighing, opens his mouth to let their boozy tongues meet, ignoring the heaviness down low in his guts that lingers until John breaks the kiss. “I love you best.” 

_I know_ , Elton thinks, but does not say this time, as the world goes blissfully dark.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic contains sex while under the influence of coke and booze, Elton's sometimes disparaging thoughts about his own body, and the use of some rather homophobic terms, mostly all used as reclaimed terms of endearment, of a sort, though there's an air of internalized homophobia about it all, as you might expect from the early to mid 1970s.
> 
> Comments and kudos and all the rest very welcome if you're so moved, and if you want Rocketman and/or Elton and the occasional 70s rock reblog mixed among your feed, I'm also [on tumblr](https://theoldgods.tumblr.com/).


End file.
